


A Crow's Letter

by WorkTillDawn



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:54:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25566217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorkTillDawn/pseuds/WorkTillDawn
Summary: The gruesome game continues on, as the hunt commences again and again. The walls spray with blood, and the cold moon shines upon the desperate. But from another perspective, hope might exist...For Ziracona, whose fiction is incredibly well-written and detailed, and inspired me to start looking at things from a different perspective. Thank you.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	1. Born

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ziracona](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ziracona/gifts).



I opened my eyes to a pulsing, dark womb. I was lying on a bed of flesh, slathered in sticky, dark tar, holding me in place on the flesh. I could feel it pulsing under me, somehow moist and yet dry at the same time. It had a life of its own, like a beating heart, and its erratic jumps brought goosebumps to my feathers.

I looked at myself. Black, moist feathers covered my chest, pulsing, as though they themselves were alive. I couldn't help but pluck at them a little bit; they resisted my pull and bounced back against my chest, but I felt no pain. My wings were a bit deformed, curving in the middle with an "S" shape, and surprisingly, they were pink, like a piece of especially tender steak, but it hurt to move them.

Where was I? I looked at the thin membrane in front of me, my own reflection staring back at me. I was a crow. My head tilted as I tried to get a better look at my curved beak; it was shiny like metal, with rough edges on the side. I pecked at the membrane, trying to get out, and I tried to tear through it with both my beak and my talons. It was surprisingly elastic, and I managed to puncture a little bit of it off with my beak, and ripped through it from there.

My claws were quite wobbly as I stepped out of the bubble-like membrane. It was then that I finally saw the reason for the erratic jumps the flesh made; it wasn't flesh, but layers and layers of crows, all taking the same posture, beneath us, in millions of little membrane bubbles, supporting our weight. All of them had black tar slathered on their bodies, but with normally shaped wings and red eyes. Some had pink wings like me, but the black tar was spreading onto those, and fast.

I was reminded of my own wings, and saw that the black tar had already spread quite thoroughly onto my wings, but the tip was still pink. Disgusted, I immediately flung off the remaining tar on myself, and that seemed to help.Why was I awake though? I looked at my companions beside me, laying in rows and rows of bubbles, and not one of them had stirred. I cawed at them, trying to get them to wake up, and escape this weird place, but not one of them responded. It was a surreal experience, watching rows and rows of your friends in a deep sleep, and knowing they probably wouldn't wake up soon.

Was this a cemetery for crows? If so, that would be weird. "If I'm dead, why am I standing here?" I asked the putrid air. It gave no response, but the pulsing of the womb seemed to quicken.

Light streamed out from behind me, and I saw a hole open at the end of the womb, and my companions sliding out, like rows and rows of sausages being rolled out on a conveyor belt. But the hole was closing again fast, and I saw that if I remained here, I, or rather, my row, would not reach there in time, and I did _not_ want to spend one more second in this god-forsaken place. So I ran as fast as my little talons could carry me, stepping over the rows and rows of thin bubbles, popping who know how many along the way, and managed to reach the hole.

It was incredibly small by this stage, so I wasted no time in burrowing myself through the pulsing hole, and trying not to get squeezed to death by the hole, I managed to get out, and tumbled onto a corridor filled with white, blinding lights.

Jake wasn't exactly having the greatest trial so far. He'd brought a great toolbox, sure, with one of the brand new parts that had taken him ages to find, but that hadn't exactly helped him. The Doctor kept fucking over his brain, making him connect the wrong wires again and again, and he could have sworn the Doctor was doing it on purpose. His mistakes were getting progressively silly, and his bad mood didn't exactly improve his logical thinking. Even though his toolbox was the best of the best, Jake still managed to fuck up an amazing seven times before finally finishing the generator, with a crazy-looking Doctor standing beside him.

Jake couldn't help giving the finger to the hallucination as he stalked off, trying to find a new generator.

They were in Lery's this match, which was good for the Doctor but bad for them, because he'd had years of experience working in this very place and they didn't. Even if one of them had managed to memorize the map, they would have been fucked up by the Doctor's amazing ability to fry brains and make people forget what they were here for. Jake had only once reached that level of madness, and it was very disorienting, with him dropping all his things and forgetting how to repair a generator. Not exactly his best memory.

The corridors seemed especially confusing with the Doctor as the killer, and Jake couldn't retrace his steps to the last generator he had worked on before being chased by the Doctor. Although the Doctor usually didn't lose people in chases because of their very obvious screaming, this was Jake, and Jake wouldn't give the Doctor the pleasure and convenience of hearing him scream, no matter what he did.

So now his head was swimming as Jake tried to reorient himself in the direction of Claudette, which was somehow on a hook again after the thirty seconds she had been rescued. Jake winced at the repetitive screams Claudette was making; the Doctor was seemingly giving her quite some blasts of his awful electricity with her ability to dodge them gone. His awful, booming laugh seemed to ricochet all over the place, and in a panic Jake looked around frantically, trying to spot the sadistic killer, before remembering that his ability was supposed to do just that; cause fear, and disrupt their progress.

Jake wasn't about to let that happen.

After some struggling, Jake managed to find a gen and start working on it, occasionally getting spooked by the Doctor's hallucinations and throwing a punch at it to stabilize his heart rate. He hated these trials; the Doctor, in some trials, could do something to make them see illusionary pallets, hear illusionary terror radii, and basically fuck them up. Jake hated the illusionary pallets especially, seeing as they disrupted his ability to kite the Doctor, and the constant, sharp pain he would receive in his brain for being so close to the Doctor wouldn't exactly be helping either.

Someone seemingly rescued Claudette; was it Meg or Tapp? He didn't and couldn't care; finishing this gen already took up his extremely small mental capacity under the influence of the Doctor. The generator lit up, and Jake sighed of relief as he stepped out of the room, and immediately got a blast of electricity from the Doctor. It was one of those big ones, the ones that would make everybody in its radius scream, and Jake finally succumbed to the electricity coursing in his brain and curled up in an attempt to regain sanity. This was the second time he'd been forced into this state by the Doctor, and it wasn't very pleasant. His uncontrollable drooling and blurred eyesight didn't exactly do anything to help, either.

Jake tried to get a hold of his surroundings and shake away his visions of Dwight dancing in a leaf skirt, which took concentration, determination, and 3 whole minutes. By the time Jake was back to normal, the Doctor was already less than 10 metres behind him, and Jake grabbed the pallet, slammed it onto the Doctor's head, and booked it feeling lucky that the pallet wasn't fake.

After losing him three times during the chase, (in which Jake finally understood how bad the Doctor was without his screams), Jake retreated to a corner to try and bandage himself while looking for the last generator. He crept around, desperately looking for somewhere, anywhere, to hide himself and get the job done, and there Claudette was, hiding in a corner, bandaging herself. Jake hurried over, happy to finally see an ally again.

"Hey mom." Jake whispered as he approached Claudette.

"Jake, don't call me mom. You're literally older than me by four years!"

Jake couldn't help but laugh quietly as he helped bandage Claudette.

"Wow, you need to teach me how to bandage myself sometime soon. You're so good at this. How do you even carry herbs in your pockets 24/7?"

"I studied botany back then in school, and I found some healing herbs in the forest beside the campfire, so I put them to use."

"Nice." Jake whistled appreciatively as he finished the job.

"Meg's looping the Doctor right now," Claudette said as she bandaged Jake while looking worriedly in the direction of the screams, "But I don't think she'll last long..."

Jake sighed, "I'm gonna go help her after you've finished. At least I can think clearly, while you don't exactly look sparkly."

Claudette winced as she remembered the shocks she received on the hook, "You're right, I'll just mess up things. I'll do the gens and you go get Meg, if you can. And don't get found by the Doctor..."

"Okay mom."

"I told you not to call me mom!"

"Yeah okay Claudette, thanks." Jake sighed in relief as she applied some aloe vera on his wounds.

"How did you even manage to get burn wounds from the Doctor?"

"He added a bit of electricity to his bat, and boom, suddenly I'm reeling from a hit that shouldn't have caused third-degree burns on my back."

Claudette shook her head, "Just be careful out there, okay?"

Jake nodded silently.

Meg ran frantically for yet another window, with the Doctor hot on her trail. The electric blasts were rendering her literally speechless already, and she just couldn't make sense of the landscape in front of her. It was all instinct from here on out, and surprisingly that got her pretty far. She'd managed to loop the Doctor for two times around the whole institute already, and somehow even in this state, Meg could tell the Doctor was pissed as hell.

Her feet thudded against the ground as she vaulted a window and barely missed the blast the Doctor gave her. Everything seemed to duplicate around her as she ran and ran, trying to gain a few more seconds for her teammates to get the door open. White hot electricity coursed through her brain as she started at the Doctor suddenly appearing in front of her, and she stumbled, the world twirling around her as she overcompensated for her misstep. Even then, a blast sent her screaming as she reeled from the shock, everything in chaos as she tried and failed to get her bearings.

The Doctor managed to get a hit on her, and she went down.

The basement was metres away, and Meg's brain cleared as she was thrown haphazardly on the hook, it tearing through her left shoulder. She screamed in pain and anger, as she tried to distance herself from the extreme pain her shoulder was giving off. In a surreal out-of-body experience, Meg watched her own body twitch under the extreme trauma, and settle down like a piece of meat on a meat hook.

 _We are kind of meat to them, aren't we?_ Meg thought, _Well fuck them, because we aren't._

The Doctor seemed to look at her body hanging on the hook for a few seconds before running off for the gates, intent on preventing the others' escape, but not before hitting her limp body a few times.

Meg winced from above, knowing that would hurt like hell later, as she watched the Doctor run off, laughing weirdly. Sighing, Meg's "spirit" decided to settle down on one of the boxes nearby. She wasn't ready to get back in her body just yet. After all, this was a technique she had learnt the hard way from her first trials; not knowing how to distance yourself from your body when you were on a hook was extremely painful and very counter-productive. Also, it made you go mad, because humans weren't supposed to feel this level of pain.

It was the only way they could survive, and though Meg didn't like it, she was forced to do so, for survival in this hell of a place.

A scream sounded from far away as Claudette got hit. Meg winced at the sound, trying to block out the trauma her ears were going through with the strong electric field the place was bathed in. Suddenly, she felt herself being pulled off the hook, and managed to come back just in time to see the Doctor send a full blast at her, having come back to intercept any rescuers.

She was absolutely fucked.

I hopped around, trying to make sense of this strange place. Where was I? It looked like a lab, but there weren't any experiments going on, although there were some screams in the distance...

I flew around, looking in corners and in rooms, and found a strange contraption that looked like a generator, and yet definitely wasn't. There was a guy with black hair on the "generator", looking quite intent in his work. He looked like he was pretty good at this, and the toolbox beside him had so many shiny, pretty things. I hopped over to him, quietly cawing, and he looked startled as he turned around, but seemed to relax when he saw me.

"Hey there little guy." The guy said, smiling.

I cawed again, quietly, as I pecked his hand gently and pulled out one of the especially shiny things that I liked. I looked at him, and he seemed to be quite surprised.

"Aren't you guys supposed to work for the Entity?" Jake asked, "You're different."

What was the Entity? I looked at him, curious, and tilted my head. This guy was interesting, and he seemed nice, somehow easier to approach than the other lady I saw before in the corridors. But I tucked away my questions, since I wouldn't be able to ask them anyway, and snuggled against him. It was nice, and warm, and I let out a contented sigh that came out as some kind of purr I didn't even know I could do. The man didn't seem to be perturbed by this, though, and smiled as he handed the shiny thing to me, saying, "Here you go little guy, I don't need this socket anyway."

So it was a socket. Although I didn't know what it meant, I still tucked it away in my little brain, to pull up later.

The nice guy started his work on the "generator" again, while maintaining a conversation with me. "My name's Jake, what's yours?"

I cawed, trying to get the words out of my mouth, but I just couldn't. Frustrated as I was, I pulled over a sheet of paper with my beak, and looked at Jake, pecking at one of the sharp-looking things.

Jake looked surprised. "Oh, you want that? Okay, go on."

I pulled it out; It was a cone-shaped metal piece, with a bit of rust on the edges. I pecked at it, rolling it over to the piece of paper, which by this time had already enticed Jake to look very interestedly at me. I hoisted the metal piece up with my beak, in an attempt to get it upright, and tore a line into the paper.

"Woah little guy, what are you doing?" Jake looked stunned.

I continued to scratch out lines on the paper against the floor, one by one. And with each line, Jake would look even more impressed, until finally, his mouth was hanging open stupidly.

"Raymond." Jake whispered.

Claudette had never been this scared of a fellow survivor.

Jake was pretty much being maniacal about the crow in his hands right now, and didn't even care about the Doctor coming for both of them. She was probably lucky; had the Doctor not been chasing Meg right now, they would have been fucked by Jake's loud voice, which literally hurt Claudette's eardrums as she worked on the generator.

Okay, maybe she was being a little harsh on him, considering she had not heard a loud voice since forever, but Jake was dooming the both of them and she didn't like it.

"Jake, be quiet!" Claudette whisper-shouted, "Where did all that talk about discretion go?"

"You don't understand! This little guy's different! He knows how to write!"

Claudette looked at him weirdly. "Don't say that, Jake. One more sentence like that and you'll jinx the ravens on us. I thought you weren't a liar."

Jake sighed exasperatedly, "I'm not lying! Like, see for yourself."

Claudette looked at the little bird. It stared back up at her, and chirped quietly, but seemed to hang back, instead choosing to lean against Jake.

"She won't hurt you, little buddy. Go on."

The little raven hopped over to Claudette and pecked her gently.

"Jake, why aren't its wings black?"

"What do you mean?" Jake leaned over, "Its wings are black."

"No, don't you see the tip? There's a bit of pink right there."

Jake was silent.

"Do you think it's even the Entity's?"

"Well, the Entity wouldn't exactly allow anything that wasn't its creation into this shithole, would it?"

"Then why is it different from all the other birds in this place?"

Jake didn't have an answer.

The little raven put its head into the generator, curious.

"No, no, that's dangerous." Jake chastised as he pulled the bird out.

"So, you told me this bird could write?"

"Yeah, it's pretty incredible."

"I still don't believe you."

"You know what, can you write your name out for Claudette again?"

The little bird just gave Jake a look and pulled out a piece of paper from under the generator.

"See?"

The word "Raymond" was scratched out on it.

"Erm, how do I know that word wasn't written by you?"

Raymond simply looked at Claudette and plopped down in front of the paper.

"Uh... okay?"

Raymond just pecked at the word.

"That's your name?"

Raymond pecked at it again.

A scream came from the far corner of Lery's, and Claudette flinched.

"Okay, you know what, I'll take your word for it for now, but try to find a way to bring this guy back to the campfire, if he wants it? Oh wait, is it a he or a she?"

"I think it's a he. Is it?"

Raymond pecked at Jake.

"I'll take that as a yes."

"Okay, I have to go for Meg now, stay here and finish the generator, okay?"

"Yeah sure, okay."

Claudette sprinted off for the direction of the screams, and Jake was left alone with Raymond once more.


	2. Chapter 2

"So, this guy's supposed to be smart?" Meg asked as she cooed at Raymond.

"Well, he did write his name out and all that, so yeah." Jake shrugged as he sat down on the log beside the campfire. "You sure you're okay?"

Meg shuddered. That end-game shock straight to the brain had _not_ been okay, but she knew better than to tell Jake that. It would just bring unneccesary worrying, and they healed after trials anyway. "Yeah, I'm okay," Meg answered, "But I hate the Doctor's mori."

"Who doesn't?" Jake sighed as he got down to work on organizing his toolbox. "It would be creepy if you didn't. You'd be a masochist that way."

Claudette shimmered into existence beside the two, holding a medkit.

"You made it out?" Meg asked happily, "I thought the Doctor had you!"

"I love end-game hatches. Well, when they're findable, at least. When you can't find them you get mad."

"Oh my god, I know right? Pesky hatches! Killing us all the time!"

"How's Tapp?" Jake asked.

"Well, when I got out he was already out through the gates," Claudette said thoughtfully, "But he hasn't come back?"

Jake nodded mutely.

"Well, maybe he went off for a detour in the forest or something." Meg said, completely focused on Raymond, who was playing with a wooden ball she found in the woods days before. "Maybe wait a bit first."

Claudette was silent, but sent off worried looks towards the forest occasionally.


End file.
